Rapid Dialog Design with the Qt C++ GUI Toolkit

If your fingers are exhausted typing or cutting-and-pasting code to create the zillions of dialog boxes needed for your application's user interface, save yourself a trip to the orthopedic surgeon: Try the Qt GUI toolkit! In just a few steps, you can build great-looking dialogs that are automatically resizable, breezily skip from one language to another, and even switch with ease from reading left-to-right to reading right-to-left.

From the author of

From the author of

Designing dialog boxesor simply "dialogs"is often the
most time-consuming part of implementing an application's user interface.
Typical applications contain a single main window, but dozens, scores, or even
hundreds of dialogs. In this article, we'll see how easy it is to develop
great-looking, resizable, platform-independent dialogs by using the Qt GUI
toolkit. We'll start by writing dialogs purely in code, then explore using
the Qt Designer tool to speed up the process by designing visually.

Getting Qt

Qt is a C++ class library and a set of tools for developing multiplatform GUI
applications using a "write once, compile anywhere" approach. Qt lets
C++ programmers use a single source tree for applications that will run on
Windows from 95 to XP, Mac OS X, UNIX/Linux, and embedded Linux. Qt is also
widely used for single-platform development because of its intuitive and
powerful object-oriented API. It's the basis of the
K Desktop Environment (KDE) on
UNIX/Linux, and is used in mass-market commercial applications such as Adobe
Photoshop Album.

Qt is developed by Trolltech and is available under various licenses. If you
want to build commercial applications, you must buy a commercial license from
Trolltech; if you want to build open source programs for UNIX/Linux or Mac OS X,
you can download the Qt Free Edition from
Trolltech's web site.
Time-limited evaluations versions are available for Windows, UNIX/Linux, and Mac
OS X.